Three of them are in their 80's and still work to this day. You can't tell them apart from an average joe (other than the fact that two of them own a jet and like to fly across the country as their 'hobby').

/cool story bro

I know one... nice guy, hard working guy... but boring as fark. All he can talk about is his work. Nothing else, ever... it's all he does, all he knows... he's not very fun to hang out with.

Loadmaster: Her point is that hard work is a good thing, and that sloth and living off the dole are bad things. And she's correct.

impaler: Also exercise it good, as well as eating healthy. Other good things include kittens, puppies and rainbows. Now if she has something to say that people don't already know...

The problem is that the bad behavior is much more acceptable than it was a generation ago. Being on food stamps, taking welfare, not having a job for years at a time used to be considered shameful and cause for being ostracized. There was a time, not too long ago, when people did not want to ask for hand-outs because of the stigma and loss of self-worth it brought. Not any more.

The Stealth Hippopotamus:You dont get to claim that being a waitress or a bartender is hard. I've worked with both, and that aint hard. Taring roofs, welding, or working a blast furnace now that hard.

Speaking as someone who (in my admittedly more physically fit youth) has tarred roofs in the dead of summer, worked throwing heavy boxes of merchandise into the back of trailers so hot you would burn your skin if you touched the walls, etc. as well as waited/tended bar:

You must have been doing the latter wrong. Sure, you may not sweat quite as much, or burn quite as many calories, but you also have to be charming as fark for hours at a stretch no matter how shiatty your day is, have to juggle more mentally, and generally put in a lot more non-physical effort.

When I was doing the "hard" work you seem to think is so self-evidently "harder", I burned through audiobooks by Rushdie, Vonnegut, Cortázar, et al. remarkably fast. You can't do that shiat in the service industry.

If you're waiting tables or bar tending and find it to be easy, you either suck at what you do, or are working at the tail ends of the distribution of money-making places. Not so different from more labor-intensive pursuits.

(Of course, it's all relative. There are times when throwing boxes into those trailers or picking up a double wait shift seem a lot more appealing than figuring out how I'm farking up my latest R script, too...)

Loadmaster:The problem is that the bad behavior is much more acceptable than it was a generation ago. Being on food stamps, taking welfare, not having a job for years at a time used to be considered shameful and cause for being ostracized. There was a time, not too long ago, when people did not want to ask for hand-outs because of the stigma and loss of self-worth it brought. Not any more.

Giant farking [citation needed].

Every culture thinks it has seen new depths of laziness and hedonism. I can read screeds like yours written in Latin.

Loadmaster:The problem is that the bad behavior is much more acceptable than it was a generation ago.

I assume you're talking about CEOs earning 100s of times their employees, golden parachutes, vulture capitalism..

Loadmaster:Being on food stamps, taking welfare, not having a job for years at a time used to be considered shameful and cause for being ostracized. There was a time, not too long ago, when people did not want to ask for hand-outs because of the stigma and loss of self-worth it brought. Not any more.

Oh FFS. Do you know how I know you're just pulling shat out of your arse here? You have to work for welfare. It's been that way for nearly 20 years. Republican propagandists told you to think that. You can prove to them you are as gullible as they think you are by continuing to believe it.

My folks came from middle class families, but they started out poor. We were on food stamps, generic-brand food, government cheese, and hand me down clothes. They worked hard - one of them as a teacher with horrible pay - and they moved up to the middle class, maybe even the upper middle.

I started working doing landscaping around the age of 13, or hauling shingles, or shoveling, or mowing lawns. I haven't not had a job since I was 15. I have a decent work ethic, and I'm now comfortably in the middle class, due to the work I've done.

Hard work and frugal behavior isn't going to make you a multimillionaire. That requires luck and timing of actions you have no control over. It won't give you F-U money, where you can do whatever you want, and treat your credit card like a genie in a bottle. I think that's what people are getting caught up in.

What it will do is let you avoid saying "I can't afford a place to live" or as I had to deal with once, "I can't afford food for the third week in a row, and I'm dying," (which is a separate CSB). You might not be able to get all the things you ever wanted, but you'll be able to get some - or even many - of the things you wanted.

BgJonson79:roc6783: BgJonson79: Lionel Mandrake: BgJonson79: Lionel Mandrake: The Stealth Hippopotamus: ***snip***But we're dealing with percentages here. Let's say she turned $2,000,000 into $20,000,000,000. That's a 20,000x increase. I don't care who you are and what you start off with, if you can get a 20,000x ROI, someone will invest a crapton of money with you!

Give me $2 million to purchase a mine that is loaded with a finite resource that is essential to the world economy, and I guarantee I will get a 20,000x ROI.

If she had taken that money and spent it on an empty mine, she would likely not have such a tall platform from which to preach to others about the virtues of hard work.

Send me the contract ;-)

The point that you are intentional ignoring is that there is no way to know that the mine is "loaded with a finite resource that is essential to the world economy" until after the fact, therefore, you are judging someone as worthwhile based on the fact that they took an educated guess and it worked out, while ignoring the thousands to millions of examples where it didn't.

Your judgement process and criteria is clearly flawed. Stop saying someone made good decisions JUST because it worked out. You can make a wrong decision and have it work out (guy who spilled a chemical on himself, tasted it, and viola artificial sweetener), or make a right decision and have it end badly (Hiroshima). Additionally, assuming this person did make good decisions for their situation, stop extrapolating that they can make good decisions for other people.

quietwalker:Coming in at the tail end so I'm sure I'll get no responses... but

My folks came from middle class families, but they started out poor. We were on food stamps, generic-brand food, government cheese, and hand me down clothes. They worked hard - one of them as a teacher with horrible pay - and they moved up to the middle class, maybe even the upper middle.

I started working doing landscaping around the age of 13, or hauling shingles, or shoveling, or mowing lawns. I haven't not had a job since I was 15. I have a decent work ethic, and I'm now comfortably in the middle class, due to the work I've done.

Hard work and frugal behavior isn't going to make you a multimillionaire. That requires luck and timing of actions you have no control over. It won't give you F-U money, where you can do whatever you want, and treat your credit card like a genie in a bottle. I think that's what people are getting caught up in.

What it will do is let you avoid saying "I can't afford a place to live" or as I had to deal with once, "I can't afford food for the third week in a row, and I'm dying," (which is a separate CSB). You might not be able to get all the things you ever wanted, but you'll be able to get some - or even many - of the things you wanted.

If you have realistic goals, you could even be content with that.

Yep. That's pretty much what everyone generally agrees on, except the white nights for the woman who inherited a mining business that became wildly profitable when iron ore's prices skyrocketed 10X this past decade.

Summercat:fireclown: Probably something to that, even though the messenger might be less than ideal.

What the hell. OK FARK, lets brainstorm. I'm willing to blow $500 on a startup. It has to be something that I can do while still working full time. Gimme your ideas.

Aquaponics. Combining Fish Farming (Aquaculture) with Hydroponics (artificial/mechanically assisted irrigated grow beds). Not many people make a *fortune* from doing this, but enough people can make their living based off of it.

Specifically, you grow Tilapia for meat, and smaller veggies/herbs. You have the water cycling through the fish grow tank and the vegetable racewayways(or however you wish to set it up), which helps simulate the natural nitrogen cycle. This A) Helps give nutrients to the plants from the fish waste, and B) Helps clean the water from the fish waste. Further, certain setups can allow the fish to nibble on the roots of whatever plants you have in the fish growout tanks.

Tilapia will eat just about anything, but need a bit of a variet diet. This can be grown on-site. Duckweed is often considered to be the bane of people who run fish tanks, but can be fed to Tilapia as a good portion of their diet. It's easy to grow, and is a fairly high-density food - and you can feed it to other fish. Tilapia also spawn thousands of fry - they're k-strategists, they spawn hundreds/thousands of little guys in the hopes that like 10 of them surive to adulthood. In the wild, that's about the right survival percentage, but in controlled conditions, you can get 90% or more of the fry to adulthood (1 to 2 lbs).

In terms of meat efficiency, Tilapia weight is equal to the weight of food they consume, a nearly 1:1 ratio. Chickens/Poultry, on the other hand, are nearly a 2lbs of food to 1lb of meat ratio, and that's among the best of traditionally-grown meat animals.

And depending on your setup, a good aquaponics system can be a minimal-grid technology - all it needs is some way to get the water from the botto ...

This is excellent info, and could be used to make decent money if the crop grown was cannabis. Too bad tilapia tastes like crap :(

cig-mkr:1) You will never get rich working for someone else2) You can't get rich by spending every dime you make on toys3) You have to make your money work for you4) Be frugal, but always buy the best you can afford5) Set goals and stay the course to achieve those goals6) Invest in the long term, (never met a rich day trader)

roc6783:The point that you are intentional ignoring is that there is no way to know that the mine is "loaded with a finite resource that is essential to the world economy" until after the fact, therefore, you are judging someone as worthwhile based on the fact that they took an educated guess and it worked out, while ignoring the thousands to millions of examples where it didn't.

Your judgement process and criteria is clearly flawed. Stop saying someone made good decisions JUST because it worked out. You can make a wrong decision and have it work out, or make a right decision and have it end badly

People don't want to believe in chance.

By paying attention to the die Player A selected,Player B could know exactly what A's intentions were.(Just to be sure, we asked several questions to checkthat Player B understood.) But then, depending on theroll of a die, accidents could happen. Player A couldchoose Die 1, the "stingy die", but end up with agenerous outcome. Conversely, she could chose Die 3,the "generous die", but end up with a stingy outcome.We gave Player B the chance to reward or punishPlayer A by adding or subtracting money from PlayerA's payoff. When accidents like these occurred, howwould Player B choose to reward or punish Player A?By focusing on her intentions (the die she chose), or byfocusing on the outcome (the way the die came up)?

The results indicated a strong role for accidentaloutcomes. When Player A chose the stingy die but itcame up generous, on average Player B responded byrewarding. And, when Player A chose the generous diebut it came up stingy, on average Player B respondedby punishing. Statistical analysis showed that Player Bpaid attention both to Player A's intentions, and also tothe outcome of the roll - but outcomes mattered justslightly more.

I wonder if the world would be better or worse off if everybody were like me.

After working for my current company for 2.5 years (job entirely unrelated to what I went to school for. Had to claw my way up in the call center), I make 42k/yr, drive a 10 y/o VW bug that I own, Fark and reddit for a respectable portion of the day, live in a tiny apartment with my fiance and our cat, and in the evenings I tend to play video games, drink beer, hang out with friends, work out, and enjoy a healthy sex life. I put away about 200 per week as savings towards the down payment on the theoretical house that we plan to buy in the 130k range.

The thing is, I could not be happier. When I left grad school I started at $10/hr as a temp in a call center, and just daisy chained from one job to another to where I am now. And it wasn't that hard. Don't have the money? Don't spend it. Don't skip work. Find ways to enjoy yourself and find success on your own terms. I'd be exhausted from just all of the feeling superior to everyone else that this woman seems to do. Never mind running a mining business; seems like so much of a hassle. I'll always prefer this life.

dittybopper:It's true that as a group, the poor are much more likely to smoke, for example. In my state, you're looking at a minimum of $7 a pack. If you smoke a pack a day, that's $49 a week, or $208 a month. That's a car payment right there, going up in smoke. Over a year, that's nearly $2,500.

It's really annoying when someone spends an entire paragraph doing simple math for me. I just had to read while you multiplied 7... thanks for that. Also, I know how many days are in a week and how many weeks are in a year.

People should stop worrying about what other people choose to do with their own lives, especially strangers. If you want to smoke, then do it. If you want to drink alcohol, do it. (just don't drive or endanger others) We are all well aware of the consequences of smoking and drinking. Enjoy your life the way you want to and stop worrying about what everyone else is doing.

As far as the article goes: Not everyone wants to be wealthy. I'm happy just being a good father and learning and reading as much as I can before I die.

If you make more than $200k, ANYWHERE in the USA, you're rich in my eyes. You are rich enough to do whatever you want.

$200K a year in the US is not enough money to do anything you want. And living in a major city makes it even less so.

Oh, really, what can't you do with $10,000 a month after taxes, even in NYC ... and yes, I lived in NYC and guess what, $3000 gets you a decently nice place, even in Manhattan. I lived in a small one bedroom in mid-town and paid $1650/month.

You're just an apologist for people making stupid decisions with their money and then complaining they don't make enough. I guarantee you I could live like a king for $5000/month after taxes in Manhattan.

"Here's what Romney doesn't understand," Stewart said. "Nobody cares that Romney is rich. It's Romney's inability to understand the institutional advantage that he gains from the government's tax code largesse. That's a little offensive to people, especially considering Romney's view on anyone else who looks to the government for things like, I don't know, food and medicine."

Am I jealous of people with more money than me? Yeah, some. But, by and large, I enjoy my life. I don't care that I'm not a multi-millionaire. All the smoking, drinking, socializing, drugs, and hookers are fun. I don't need a billion dollars to enjoy those things. What pisses me off is the mythology that these guys are peddling, that they got to where they are with no help from anybody else, and anybody can work hard enough to be a billionaire like them. They then proceed to game the system, lobbying for every tax advantage they can get, by selling the myth that if they only get one more tax break, they'll look out for the little guy out of the goodness of their own heart, just trust them.

vpb:Carousel Beast: vpb: That's comical. No one gets rich from hard work. You can inherit it, you can steal it, you can exploit flaws in the financial system, you can get lucky in the stock market (assuming you have a lot of money to invest in the first place), win the lottery etc. Working won't do it for you, working makes other people rich.

Besides, it is interesting to me that the wealthy people who think this way are almost always people who inherited their money. People like Warren Buffett seem to have more of a grasp of reality, since they actually had to do something to make their money.

Are you willfully ignorant, or just inherently stupid?

Is this the "paint your opponent with your weakness thing?

Are you really stupid enough to think anyone ever got rich by working hard, or are you stupid enough to think that the financial shenanigans, fraud and similar things that actually make people rich are "work"?

Who cares? Might makes right, and rich is our culture's version of "might". If someone gets away with fraud, it isn't fraud. If someone gets away with theft, it isn't theft.

You have no place to argue, because you don't have enough money for your opinion to mean anything.

I love being called lazy by a disgusting lump of fat who has never faced any real risk or want in her life.

Personally, I think she's hoping that someone will be pissed off enough to kill her and end her disgusting existence. Or maybe saying shiat like that is the only way she can get up enough self-esteem to be happy, despite the billions.

Either way, I have to admit, I wouldn't trade places. Given all the variables, 20 Billion isn't enough to be her.

/lesson to conservative class warriors...there's a difference between finding a rich person to be clueless, annoying, dishonest, and disgusting, and actually envying their wealth. But hey, keep on telling yourselves whatever lies make you feel better, I guess.

Debeo Summa Credo:Laughable nonsense. I paid all those people to build the factories. They were compensated at a mutually agreeable wage and have no claim to any ownership in the company.

If you pay a contractor to build an addition to your home, do he and all his employees have the right to say they own part of your house? You didn't build it, they did. You just paid for their labor to build it

I agree that vps' example might not have been the best, but the point he is claiming is valid: there is a distinction to be made between being able to inherit your father's money, and being able to inherit your father's power. It's easy to seperate the two when we talk about the middle class, because they have no power. They only have things. But it's not so easy when we talk about the people who actually control the means of production. Just as the masses rose up against hereditary political rulers, they will rise up against hereditary economic rulers. At least in France. Americans are a bunch of pussies.

dittybopper:If you are born into wealth, it's very likely that you learned your money handling skills from your parents. Those skills might not be the kind necessary to *MAKE* a fortune, but they would at least be the kind that allow you to *RETAIN* one.

Neither of these guys had parents on food stamps or parents living pay check to pay check. Zuckerberg and gates both went to exclusive prep schools and had enough wealth to afford to go to Harvard and was raised in an atmosphere where he had the connections to apply. These are people that were born on third base.

Also... they're smart. If you have $1 billion, but an IQ of 85, you're still not going to Harvard.

BgJonson79:Lionel Mandrake: The Stealth Hippopotamus: I dont care what you say about this lady she was handed she built on it. She is a success.

Give me a shiat-ton of money and I guaran-farkin-tee I'll turn it into more money.

Thousands of times as much? Cause I'll send $10 right now if you can turn it into $30k.

Give me millions of dollars AND a mining company that holds the lease to one of the largest iron ore deposits in the world and I'll turn into thousands of times more. She didn't just get the money she got the company as well and in case you hadn't noticed with the Chinese boom the price of raw materials has skyrocketed.

MikeMc:Give me millions of dollars AND a mining company that holds the lease to one of the largest iron ore deposits in the world and I'll turn into thousands of times more. She didn't just get the money she got the company as well and in case you hadn't noticed with the Chinese boom the price of raw materials has skyrocketed.

10 X for iron ore prices in the last 10 years. She must truly be awesome to be responsible for the boom in Chinese manufacturing that created a massive demand for her iron ore.

Carousel Beast:vpb: That's comical. No one gets rich from hard work. You can inherit it, you can steal it, you can exploit flaws in the financial system, you can get lucky in the stock market (assuming you have a lot of money to invest in the first place), win the lottery etc. Working won't do it for you, working makes other people rich.

Besides, it is interesting to me that the wealthy people who think this way are almost always people who inherited their money. People like Warren Buffett seem to have more of a grasp of reality, since they actually had to do something to make their money.

Are you willfully ignorant, or just inherently stupid?

Now now, he could easily be both.

In the UK Alan Sugar started selling crap in a market stall at 15. Lord Forte was an immigrant who started a milk bar and built up a hotel chain. Richard Bransons family were fairly broke when he was a child but he started a magazine while still at school and then expanded into the music business. Ronald Hobson and Donald Gosling bought a derelict bomb site for £200 after the war and built up a huge car park business. Bernie Ecclestone was born the son of a man who worked on fishing trawlers. James Dyson spent years trying to raise the money to build his vacuum cleaner before a licence deal with a Japanese company gave him the money. Charles Dunstone started what became the UKs biggest mobile phone retailer with £6000 in savings in 1989. etc etc....

None inherited money. None stole it. None made their fortune gambling on the stock market. None won the lottery. They worked for it and made their fortune.

"If you have a hundred dollars and want to make it a hundred and ten, that's work. If you have a hundred million dollars and want to make it a hundred and ten million, that's inevitable" (source unknown)

Buy $90 worth of Coke in cans and an insulated bag and some ice. Pick a good spot on a hot day and you can easily sell them for double the price you paid if you bought them in a supermarket multipack. $90 clear profit for maybe a couple of hours work. And you get to just wander around a park or somewhere on a nice day. Easy. Richard Branson started his business when he was still at school. Ditto Alan Sugar.

Flint Ironstag:Carousel Beast: vpb: ***snip***None inherited money. None stole it. None made their fortune gambling on the stock market. None won the lottery. They worked for it and made their fortune.

And all took advantage of fortuitous market conditions that provided opportunities out of their control. How many other people do the same thing, but fail, and aren't held up as paragons of stick-to-it-ness and hard work? Also, how many of those people became billionaires off the sweat of their own brows? Oh that's right, none. They may have had an idea or design, but they all have/had armies of people working for them to get them to the billionaire plateau.

The idea that anyone can be wildly rich without significant contributions from other people is ridiculous. Why do people keep buying into the mythical "self-made man"? There comes a point when an individual's labor and vision is not enough to expand a business. From the point you take on your first employee, partner, investor, or loan you are no longer "self-made". You are now standing on the backs of others.

I do not begrudge anyone their fortune, just stop claiming that they did it all through hard work, guts, and bootstraps. If there is someone out there that owns a sole proprietorship, is their only employee, never took a loan or endowment, and is a billionaire, then that person would have a better argument. Now if that person amassed that wealth without the privilege of using publicly funded utilities, roads, courts, or technologies, then they would have an even stronger argument.

Until you find such a person, stop claiming that anyone is "self-made", it is preposterous.

SergeantStedanko:The thing I don't get about her argument: not everyone can do it. I don't mean because not everyone has the skills (although that's true), but because it's not mathematically possible.

I'm no economist, but there are N dollars in the economy. If we all woke up tomorrow and had exactly equal skill and drive, we wouldn't all become rich. Someone has to consume the production.

Also, I agree with those above who say to become rich you must start a business. Someone replied and said that they know people making 6 figures working for the man. The kind of 6 figures you make being an employee won't get you rich. If you are very, very elite you might make over $500k/year as an employee somewhere, but that's extremely rare.

You're not an economist. The "natural" amount of dollars in an economy is zero. All wealth is created. By enterprises. The more people who start a small business, work hard and succeed the more wealth there will be in an economy.Not everyone can be a billionaire playboy, there will always be a need for people to work at McDonalds and to sweep the streets, but the more people who become wealthy the more those workers will have to be paid.

A company I worked for years ago opened a branch in Reading UK. At that time many large corporations had opened offices in Reading so the place I worked for just could not get anyone to do some menial jobs. They had to pay more, far more than every other branch in the company, just to get shop floor workers. That's what happens when lots of people become better off.

Youre looking at it from the wrong angle. Why shouldn't the person who built the organization be able to do whatever he/she wants with it?

If I am smart/lucky/hard working enough to build a business worth $100m/$2m/150k or whatever, why shouldn't I be able to give it to my lazy stupid son? Sure, he didn't do anything to deserve it but I did and want it to go to him.

No, you are looking at it from the wrong angle. A company is a group of people working together. You may have played a major role in building it, and you may be a part of it, but you didn't build it all by yourself.

You may have contributed money and time and maybe leadership, so you earned something. Not everything but something. Your son didn't. He certainly didn't earn the right to control other peoples livelihoods or to control the fraction of the economy that that company represents.

Typically the owner will have risked his money. Business fails, he loses the lot. Business makes a loss, he has to cover it. Employees get a regular pay check. Business makes a loss, they still get paid. Business fails they go and find another job.

If the owner doesn't get to make the decisions why would he take the risk? Result: No businesses. No jobs.

Silverstaff:This idea that everybody can be rich if they just work hard is an illusion that needs to be dispelled.

At best, people can become middle-class and comfortable through hard work and halfway sound financial decisions.

Rich? That's pure luck of either birth or circumstance.

Okay. Let's say you're a typical, average, normal American, just very hard working. You are born to a middle class or lower-middle-class family. You get slightly above average grades (average intellect, but study hard). You work a part-time job in your teenage years.

You want to go to College to get ahead. Well, you've got two choices (since your parents aren't rich enough to pay for it all)

1. Go deep into student loan debt, racking up tens of thousands of dollars of debt in the hope your education will pay it off.2. Join the military and use your GI Bill and/or Tuition Assistance to pay for College. This hopes that you can get into the military and don't have a disqualifying medical condition, or otherwise are suitable for military service.

So, once you've traded off either 6 years of your life, or a mid-five-figure range debt for a degree, what are you going to do?

Now, let's assume you followed the popular advice here on Fark and majored in a hard science, like Physics or Chemistry. Well, university calculus is pretty freaking hard, and so are upper-level hard science classes, so even though you're a hard worker, Mr. Average will barely pass and skate by with a mediocre GPA.

Okay, you're in the job market. . .now what? Job market stinks. That science degree makes you fit to hold the same jobs any other college graduate has, or to work as a lab assistant. A Bachelor's degree, or even a Master's degree in hard sciences doesn't guarantee a good job.

So, you can go to graduate school, and hope to get a Ph.D. and make your way into academia. . .but that isn't going to make you "rich", just mildly affluent (at best). Your average intellect will have trouble competing with the el ...

There are people today, right now, making their fortune selling stuff on ebay. A business that they may have started with a few hundred dollars of "capital"Like Alan Sugar did when he started selling cheap stuff in a market stall in a working class area of London. At fifteen years old. Now he worth a billion dollars and is the UK host of The Apprentice.

No degree. No inheritance. No huge capital to start. No friends in high places.

"Think of how many more jobs we could create if we weren't legally required to pay you a living wage! Unemployment would vanish! You really should consider abolishing this pesky legislation."

What an insulting biatch. Go tell a soldier, teacher or fireman that they obviously don't work as hard as you. Or get it through your fat, ugly skull that hard work doesn't magically convert into dollars.

Not to be pendantic, but The Woz and James Cameron aren't billionaires ... Cameron is about $700 million and The Woz is about $100 Million.

I would replace James Cameron with George Lucas. Fark off, for all the shiat people gives him, we'd all be watching movies in claymation of it wasn't for Lucas pouring money into Industrial Light and Magic. Maybe CGI is overused but there's a lot of movies that just couldn't be made with the director's vision in mind without it. ILM operated in the red for a long time and Lucas didn't give up on it.